“We're Gonna Need A Bigger Database”

What is WebScaleSQL?

WebScaleSQL is a collaboration among engineers from several companies that face similar challenges in running MySQL at scale, and seek greater performance from a database technology tailored for their needs.

Our goal in launching WebScaleSQL is to enable the scale-oriented members of the MySQL community to work more closely together in order to prioritize the aspects that are most important to us. We aim to create a more integrated system of knowledge-sharing to help companies leverage the great features already found in MySQL 5.6, while building and adding more features that are specific to deployments in large scale environments. In the last few months, engineers from all four companies have contributed code and provided feedback to each other to develop a new, more unified, and more collaborative branch of MySQL.

But as effective as this collaboration has been so far, we know we’re not the only ones who are trying to solve these particular challenges. So we will keep WebScaleSQL open as we go, to encourage others who have the scale and resources to customize MySQL to join in our efforts. And of course we will welcome input from anyone who wants to contribute, regardless of what they are currently working on.

Who is behind WebScaleSQL?

WebScaleSQL currently includes contributions from MySQL engineering teams at Alibaba, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Together, we are working to share a common base of code changes to the upstream MySQL branch that we can all use and that will be made available via open source. This collaboration will expand on existing work by the MySQL community, and we will continue to track the upstream branch that is the latest, production-ready release (currently MySQL 5.6).

How can you help?

Follow the links on the right to help out.

Check out the current chatter on the mailing list and Facebook group, and join in if you have something to add.

Check out the code on GitHub, report any bugs you find, and let us know what you think!